Video wird geladen...

Video konnte nicht geladen werden

Zur Startseite

How a lawyer hacking together email scripts built a $3B+ category-defining company. Jason Boehmig (Jason Boehmig), founder of Ironclad, the contract lifecycle platform used by L’Oréal, Mastercard, Heineken, and hundreds more - never planned to be a founder. He was an associate at Fenwick writing automation hacks for himself…...

daraladje's profile picture

Dara

10,916 subscribers

44,296 Aufrufe • vor 8 Monaten •via X (Twitter)

LIVE

Anya Rossi• Live Now

Private livecam show

0 Kommentare

Keine Kommentare verfügbar

Kommentare vom Original-Post werden hier angezeigt

Ähnliche Videos

Michael Truell (Michael Truell), co-founder and CEO of Anysphere, the company behind Cursor, joined Garry Tan to talk about building one of the fastest-growing startups of all time—and why he's betting everything on a world beyond code. He walks through the early insights that led him and his co-founders to leave a promising AI-powered CAD project and instead chase a bigger dream: reinventing how software is written. From the hard years of false starts and rewrites to Cursor's breakthrough moment, Michael explains what it really takes to build a tool that could eventually replace programming as we know it. He also reflects on their first 10 hires, why taste still matters, and how the decade ahead will unlock a new kind of creativity for builders everywhere. 01:00 - A new way to build software 04:50 - Two ways to view LLMs 05:50 - Bottlenecks to superhuman agents 08:30 - New approaches to coding UI 09:40 - Why taste still matters 12:15 - Niche software opportunities 13:30 - Cursor origin story 16:00 - The first problem they tried solving 17:20 - Why they abandoned the CAD idea 21:00 - Pivoting to Cursor 23:00 - Following the scaling laws 27:00 - Getting to PMF 30:00 - “Dogfooding” 31:00 - First 10 hires 32:50 - How to evaluate great engineers 33:45 - Maintaining the hacker mindset 35:00 - What are the moats for AI coding tools? 37:00 - Looking ahead
37:28

Michael Truell (Michael Truell), co-founder and CEO of Anysphere, the company behind Cursor, joined Garry Tan to talk about building one of the fastest-growing startups of all time—and why he's betting everything on a world beyond code. He walks through the early insights that led him and his co-founders to leave a promising AI-powered CAD project and instead chase a bigger dream: reinventing how software is written. From the hard years of false starts and rewrites to Cursor's breakthrough moment, Michael explains what it really takes to build a tool that could eventually replace programming as we know it. He also reflects on their first 10 hires, why taste still matters, and how the decade ahead will unlock a new kind of creativity for builders everywhere. 01:00 - A new way to build software 04:50 - Two ways to view LLMs 05:50 - Bottlenecks to superhuman agents 08:30 - New approaches to coding UI 09:40 - Why taste still matters 12:15 - Niche software opportunities 13:30 - Cursor origin story 16:00 - The first problem they tried solving 17:20 - Why they abandoned the CAD idea 21:00 - Pivoting to Cursor 23:00 - Following the scaling laws 27:00 - Getting to PMF 30:00 - “Dogfooding” 31:00 - First 10 hires 32:50 - How to evaluate great engineers 33:45 - Maintaining the hacker mindset 35:00 - What are the moats for AI coding tools? 37:00 - Looking ahead

Y Combinator

337,015 Aufrufe • vor 1 Jahr

AI legal startups are a thing in 2024. But as Ironclad’s Jason Boehmig puts it, “nobody was trying to buy an AI legal assistant back in 2015.” Ironclad has one of the most interesting and underexplored stories out there IMO. As we were developing First Round's PMF Method, we learned so much from their journey — super grateful Jason took the time to share his insights for other builders. 🙏 Here were a few of my takeaways: 🔬 Zoom in to find focus “It was actually fairly easy to sign up early customers — what was difficult was finding a product that could address that market. That took us several years of iteration. We had to try to figure out what pieces we could peel off into a repeatable, discrete software product. We quickly realized the really interesting part of the problem was in repeatable business transactions — sales agreements, employment agreements, NDAs licensing agreements, partnership agreements. A lot of our competitors tried to do everything that corporate legal teams do. But we were only doing the contract part.” 📣 Expand an existing category (with an existing buying cycle) But the initial AI legal assistant positioning wasn’t resonating. I’ve talked to 100s of founders about PMF and the story of how Ironclad got unstuck is one of the wildest ones I’ve heard. “100% of the time I had to explain what an AI legal assistant was. We had a hello@ironclad.ai email on our site. One day I got a one-liner message that said, ‘Hello, are you a CLM?’ I was so close to hitting archive, but it was from someone at a publicly traded company. But what was a CLM? Turns out it’s a Contract Lifecycle Management platform that helps enterprise companies create and manage their legal contracts. By that definition, we were. So of course I wrote back, ‘Yes, we are definitely a CLM, we would love to come demo our CLM for you.’ But while we were really great at creating contracts with our AI legal assistant product, we hadn't put a lot of thought into how you deal with contracts afterwards, with a feature called a repository. And so we had set up this demo with the legal team from this publicly traded company, and I turned to my co-founder Cai, and said, ‘By the way, we have 3 hours to build a repository.’ We took the train from SF to San Jose and he built the first version of a repository, which we demoed live at the end of the train ride. This customer was in a CLM evaluation cycle that had 12 other solutions in it, but they loved the demo. So we went and actually built the full product, and we won. And after that, of course, we changed our messaging. We got serious about building CLM functionality and that's our flagship product to this day. There were lots of people out there trying to buy a CLM so we just got to participate in a lot of buying cycles, but with the AI legal assistant buying cycle, we had to create every one of those.” 👥 Artificially constrain the buyer and build community early “One of the things that we did which was really helpful in hindsight was we artificially constrained the buyer we were going after. Once we decided to make the shift to enterprise, instead of trying to address the whole US market or the whole global market, we decided we only cared about being the number one CLM in SoMa. We got a list of every company that could use the CLM in SoMa and got intros to them — it just provided a ton of focus for us. It's how we also stumbled into doing community. We would host these community dinners and if you were a general counsel of a company based in SoMa, you probably knew other people that were coming to them. We just started to get this buzz of ‘Are you going to the Ironclad thing tonight?’ There's a ton of value if you can discover a part of the organization that no one cares about, and connect that part of the organization to a larger business problem.” 📚 Founder-led sales is learnable I was impressed to learn that Jason still sends cold outreach himself to this day. But founder-led sales didn’t come naturally. “A misconception I had about early-stage startups was that the cartoon character salesperson who's slapping everyone on the back and is a total extrovert is the best salesperson. And it's actually the person who's almost like an engineer in their mindset — super methodical, sends great follow ups, could be very shy. It's a very learnable skill.”
7:07

AI legal startups are a thing in 2024. But as Ironclad’s Jason Boehmig puts it, “nobody was trying to buy an AI legal assistant back in 2015.” Ironclad has one of the most interesting and underexplored stories out there IMO. As we were developing First Round's PMF Method, we learned so much from their journey — super grateful Jason took the time to share his insights for other builders. 🙏 Here were a few of my takeaways: 🔬 Zoom in to find focus “It was actually fairly easy to sign up early customers — what was difficult was finding a product that could address that market. That took us several years of iteration. We had to try to figure out what pieces we could peel off into a repeatable, discrete software product. We quickly realized the really interesting part of the problem was in repeatable business transactions — sales agreements, employment agreements, NDAs licensing agreements, partnership agreements. A lot of our competitors tried to do everything that corporate legal teams do. But we were only doing the contract part.” 📣 Expand an existing category (with an existing buying cycle) But the initial AI legal assistant positioning wasn’t resonating. I’ve talked to 100s of founders about PMF and the story of how Ironclad got unstuck is one of the wildest ones I’ve heard. “100% of the time I had to explain what an AI legal assistant was. We had a [email protected] email on our site. One day I got a one-liner message that said, ‘Hello, are you a CLM?’ I was so close to hitting archive, but it was from someone at a publicly traded company. But what was a CLM? Turns out it’s a Contract Lifecycle Management platform that helps enterprise companies create and manage their legal contracts. By that definition, we were. So of course I wrote back, ‘Yes, we are definitely a CLM, we would love to come demo our CLM for you.’ But while we were really great at creating contracts with our AI legal assistant product, we hadn't put a lot of thought into how you deal with contracts afterwards, with a feature called a repository. And so we had set up this demo with the legal team from this publicly traded company, and I turned to my co-founder Cai, and said, ‘By the way, we have 3 hours to build a repository.’ We took the train from SF to San Jose and he built the first version of a repository, which we demoed live at the end of the train ride. This customer was in a CLM evaluation cycle that had 12 other solutions in it, but they loved the demo. So we went and actually built the full product, and we won. And after that, of course, we changed our messaging. We got serious about building CLM functionality and that's our flagship product to this day. There were lots of people out there trying to buy a CLM so we just got to participate in a lot of buying cycles, but with the AI legal assistant buying cycle, we had to create every one of those.” 👥 Artificially constrain the buyer and build community early “One of the things that we did which was really helpful in hindsight was we artificially constrained the buyer we were going after. Once we decided to make the shift to enterprise, instead of trying to address the whole US market or the whole global market, we decided we only cared about being the number one CLM in SoMa. We got a list of every company that could use the CLM in SoMa and got intros to them — it just provided a ton of focus for us. It's how we also stumbled into doing community. We would host these community dinners and if you were a general counsel of a company based in SoMa, you probably knew other people that were coming to them. We just started to get this buzz of ‘Are you going to the Ironclad thing tonight?’ There's a ton of value if you can discover a part of the organization that no one cares about, and connect that part of the organization to a larger business problem.” 📚 Founder-led sales is learnable I was impressed to learn that Jason still sends cold outreach himself to this day. But founder-led sales didn’t come naturally. “A misconception I had about early-stage startups was that the cartoon character salesperson who's slapping everyone on the back and is a total extrovert is the best salesperson. And it's actually the person who's almost like an engineer in their mindset — super methodical, sends great follow ups, could be very shy. It's a very learnable skill.”

Todd Jackson

50,683 Aufrufe • vor 2 Jahren

Warp (YC W23) recently announced a $60M Series B and now serves more than 1,000 customers, processing over $600M in payroll annually and on track to surpass $2B in the next year. In this episode of Founder Firesides, YC's Harj Taggar sits down with Warp founder and CEO Ayush Sharma (Ayush S) to talk about how the company found its way into one of enterprise software's most competitive markets and why AI is fundamentally changing how software companies should be built. 00:50 - From India to MIT 03:10 - Betting on an Unsexy Problem 05:18 - The Wedge That Started Warp 09:49 - What "AI-Native" Really Means 12:31 - Building a Different Kind of Company 14:00 - Why AI Favors Technical Founders 16:42 - The Next Generation of Enterprise Software 21:25 - Why Investors Backed Warp 25:11 - The Future of Employee Management
26:58

Warp (YC W23) recently announced a $60M Series B and now serves more than 1,000 customers, processing over $600M in payroll annually and on track to surpass $2B in the next year. In this episode of Founder Firesides, YC's Harj Taggar sits down with Warp founder and CEO Ayush Sharma (Ayush S) to talk about how the company found its way into one of enterprise software's most competitive markets and why AI is fundamentally changing how software companies should be built. 00:50 - From India to MIT 03:10 - Betting on an Unsexy Problem 05:18 - The Wedge That Started Warp 09:49 - What "AI-Native" Really Means 12:31 - Building a Different Kind of Company 14:00 - Why AI Favors Technical Founders 16:42 - The Next Generation of Enterprise Software 21:25 - Why Investors Backed Warp 25:11 - The Future of Employee Management

Y Combinator

500,843 Aufrufe • vor 1 Monat

NEW EPISODE of Long Strange Trip with the CEO of Clay, Kareem Amin Clay is one of those companies where iykyk. The Go-To-Market Platform for the AI Era that went from $1M ➡️$100M ARR in two years. But it wasn't always that way. Everyone I spoke to about Kareem, from employees to investors, to former colleagues and even competitors describe him as more of a philosopher who happens to be scaling a 🚀 than a typical CEO. They aren't wrong. Kareem is different. A few things we get into → Why "9-9-6" is performance art and sometimes a sign you just don't have a moat → How they run the company with “just-in-time” decision making, not exact team meetings (love this) → How they named a category instead of trying to invent one, and turned the Go To Market Engineer into a movement → Being a momentum detective & where a CEO should actually spend their time → Why he answered a pricing backlash by publishing his exact internal reasoning → Building from wholeness, and not the overplayed chip on the shoulder → The silent-retreat realization that changed how he thinks about building → The Hegelian Product Flip strategy → Why future thinking can be detrimental 00:00 Introduction 01:35 Competitive Fire and Drive 03:06 Building From Wholeness 06:42 Living in the Present 09:31 Contrarian Founder Style 14:40 Five Years in the Desert 27:35 Naming GTM Engineering 35:49 Winning Content Battles 36:10 Naming the Category 37:27 Building the Agency Channel 40:19 Pricing Backlash Playbook 43:15 Momentum Detective CEO 52:32 Trust and Tough Calls 01:03:49 Calling Out Elephants 01:06:41 Closing 👇Full episode in the comments
1:09:26

NEW EPISODE of Long Strange Trip with the CEO of Clay, Kareem Amin Clay is one of those companies where iykyk. The Go-To-Market Platform for the AI Era that went from $1M ➡️$100M ARR in two years. But it wasn't always that way. Everyone I spoke to about Kareem, from employees to investors, to former colleagues and even competitors describe him as more of a philosopher who happens to be scaling a 🚀 than a typical CEO. They aren't wrong. Kareem is different. A few things we get into → Why "9-9-6" is performance art and sometimes a sign you just don't have a moat → How they run the company with “just-in-time” decision making, not exact team meetings (love this) → How they named a category instead of trying to invent one, and turned the Go To Market Engineer into a movement → Being a momentum detective & where a CEO should actually spend their time → Why he answered a pricing backlash by publishing his exact internal reasoning → Building from wholeness, and not the overplayed chip on the shoulder → The silent-retreat realization that changed how he thinks about building → The Hegelian Product Flip strategy → Why future thinking can be detrimental 00:00 Introduction 01:35 Competitive Fire and Drive 03:06 Building From Wholeness 06:42 Living in the Present 09:31 Contrarian Founder Style 14:40 Five Years in the Desert 27:35 Naming GTM Engineering 35:49 Winning Content Battles 36:10 Naming the Category 37:27 Building the Agency Channel 40:19 Pricing Backlash Playbook 43:15 Momentum Detective CEO 52:32 Trust and Tough Calls 01:03:49 Calling Out Elephants 01:06:41 Closing 👇Full episode in the comments

Brian Halligan

78,605 Aufrufe • vor 22 Tagen

In this episode of Design Review, Aaron Epstein sits down with Jorn van Dijk, the CEO and Co-founder of Framer. Together they unpack the brutal “gray zone” between early revenue and real product-market fit, the pivot that reignited their growth, and how to adapt as AI reshapes how we build and design software. 00:00 - Intro to Jorn van Dijk, the CEO and co-founder of Framer 00:34 - Framer’s Scale: $2B Valuation, 120 People around the globe 01:06 - Jorn’s Design Roots 01:49 - Why Dutch Design Culture Is So Strong 03:43 - Sofa: The Studio That Shaped Jorn (and His Co-Founder) 04:39 - Building Mac Products: Checkout, Versions, Kaleidoscope 06:13 - Apple Design Awards And A Game Changing Email 07:24 - Facebook Acquisition: Why They Wanted Designers 09:27 - Culture Shock: From 15-Person Studio to Facebook Scale 10:27 - Leaving Facebook: Intentionally Learning to Build a Big Company 13:12 - Early Experiments: Bitcoin App, Fashion App, Framer Prototype Tool 18:37 - The Plateau: Why Framer Studio Hit a Ceiling Around $4–5M ARR 23:52 - The Decision: Sell, Quit, or Pivot 25:30 - The Big Insight: People Hate Rebuilding 34:55 - AI + Design: What’s Changing & What Isn’t
44:25

In this episode of Design Review, Aaron Epstein sits down with Jorn van Dijk, the CEO and Co-founder of Framer. Together they unpack the brutal “gray zone” between early revenue and real product-market fit, the pivot that reignited their growth, and how to adapt as AI reshapes how we build and design software. 00:00 - Intro to Jorn van Dijk, the CEO and co-founder of Framer 00:34 - Framer’s Scale: $2B Valuation, 120 People around the globe 01:06 - Jorn’s Design Roots 01:49 - Why Dutch Design Culture Is So Strong 03:43 - Sofa: The Studio That Shaped Jorn (and His Co-Founder) 04:39 - Building Mac Products: Checkout, Versions, Kaleidoscope 06:13 - Apple Design Awards And A Game Changing Email 07:24 - Facebook Acquisition: Why They Wanted Designers 09:27 - Culture Shock: From 15-Person Studio to Facebook Scale 10:27 - Leaving Facebook: Intentionally Learning to Build a Big Company 13:12 - Early Experiments: Bitcoin App, Fashion App, Framer Prototype Tool 18:37 - The Plateau: Why Framer Studio Hit a Ceiling Around $4–5M ARR 23:52 - The Decision: Sell, Quit, or Pivot 25:30 - The Big Insight: People Hate Rebuilding 34:55 - AI + Design: What’s Changing & What Isn’t

Y Combinator

19,897 Aufrufe • vor 6 Monaten

Episode #113: Howie: The AI Secretary I talked to austin petersmith at Howie about why AI assistants are so hard to build, deciding to make Howie super narrow, and everything that went into build the product, brand, naming, and viral launch video. Thanks to Hanover Park for supporting this episode! Stream here on X + link in the replies. Timestamps: 3:35 Howie: The AI Secretary 6:08 Why AI assistants are so hard to build 16:19 Why Howie started in email 20:49 Adding a human in the loop 30:48 AI software vs AI-powered humans 36:21 How a meme inspired Howie 39:29 Inside the making of Howie’s launch video 44:15 Howie’s viral launch video + Discussion 53:47 Designing the brand 1:01:37 Long-term opportunity and roadmap 1:07:53 Working for Jason Calacanis 1:12:00 Jason’s media lessons 1:16:51 How Howie got its first users 1:19:35 Pitch deck strategy that raised $6m 1:24:09 The mistake of optimizing for growth too soon 1:29:48 Building an AI company outside of SF 1:33:13 Being Superhuman’s 1st customer, Mercury’s 3rd
1:39:50

Episode #113: Howie: The AI Secretary I talked to austin petersmith at Howie about why AI assistants are so hard to build, deciding to make Howie super narrow, and everything that went into build the product, brand, naming, and viral launch video. Thanks to Hanover Park for supporting this episode! Stream here on X + link in the replies. Timestamps: 3:35 Howie: The AI Secretary 6:08 Why AI assistants are so hard to build 16:19 Why Howie started in email 20:49 Adding a human in the loop 30:48 AI software vs AI-powered humans 36:21 How a meme inspired Howie 39:29 Inside the making of Howie’s launch video 44:15 Howie’s viral launch video + Discussion 53:47 Designing the brand 1:01:37 Long-term opportunity and roadmap 1:07:53 Working for Jason Calacanis 1:12:00 Jason’s media lessons 1:16:51 How Howie got its first users 1:19:35 Pitch deck strategy that raised $6m 1:24:09 The mistake of optimizing for growth too soon 1:29:48 Building an AI company outside of SF 1:33:13 Being Superhuman’s 1st customer, Mercury’s 3rd

The Peel

92,828 Aufrufe • vor 10 Monaten

A former lawyer turned founder, Jake Heller set out to make legal work faster, fairer, and more accessible through AI with Casetext (acquired by Thomson Reuters for $650M in 2023). On the Social Radars, he shares how a weekend with an early version of GPT-4 convinced him to pivot the entire company, what it means to be in founder mode during moments of extreme technological change, and how a decade of grinding led to one of the biggest exits in legal tech. 01:20 – Founding Casetext 03:10 – Early Struggles in Legal Tech 06:00 – The Decade-Long Grind to PMF 08:15 – A Weekend with GPT-4 That Changed Everything 11:30 – Pivoting the Company Around AI 14:40 – Building Trust in AI for Legal Work 17:50 – Scaling Casetext to Thousands of Firms 21:10 – Acquisition by Thomson Reuters for $650M 24:00 – What It Means to Stay in Founder Mode 26:20 – Lessons for Founders in Highly Regulated Industries 28:10 – The Future of AI and the Law
23:41

A former lawyer turned founder, Jake Heller set out to make legal work faster, fairer, and more accessible through AI with Casetext (acquired by Thomson Reuters for $650M in 2023). On the Social Radars, he shares how a weekend with an early version of GPT-4 convinced him to pivot the entire company, what it means to be in founder mode during moments of extreme technological change, and how a decade of grinding led to one of the biggest exits in legal tech. 01:20 – Founding Casetext 03:10 – Early Struggles in Legal Tech 06:00 – The Decade-Long Grind to PMF 08:15 – A Weekend with GPT-4 That Changed Everything 11:30 – Pivoting the Company Around AI 14:40 – Building Trust in AI for Legal Work 17:50 – Scaling Casetext to Thousands of Firms 21:10 – Acquisition by Thomson Reuters for $650M 24:00 – What It Means to Stay in Founder Mode 26:20 – Lessons for Founders in Highly Regulated Industries 28:10 – The Future of AI and the Law

Y Combinator

144,202 Aufrufe • vor 10 Monaten

.Kirsten Green, founder of Forerunner and investor behind Oura Ring, Hims, and Dollar Shave Club says the biggest risk in consumer is the “say/do gap.” People say one thing, but what they do tells a different story. The ability to spot these latent behaviors - the ones that feel “weird” today but inevitable tomorrow - is what Forerunner calls CQ (Consumer Quotient). In this episode of The Library of Minds, we cover: • Why early data misleads founders building consumer products • How intuition detects behavior before metrics do • Why “discomfort” is the earliest sign of a real insight • How to read emotional signals consumers can’t articulate • The danger of relying on “experienced patterns” in fast-moving markets Kirsten breaks down how she built a $3B consumer fund by treating intuition as a skill to train - not a feeling to trust blindly. For anyone navigating consumer behavior, this conversation is a reminder that the earliest truths aren’t found in the data - they’re sensed in the moment.
38:28

.Kirsten Green, founder of Forerunner and investor behind Oura Ring, Hims, and Dollar Shave Club says the biggest risk in consumer is the “say/do gap.” People say one thing, but what they do tells a different story. The ability to spot these latent behaviors - the ones that feel “weird” today but inevitable tomorrow - is what Forerunner calls CQ (Consumer Quotient). In this episode of The Library of Minds, we cover: • Why early data misleads founders building consumer products • How intuition detects behavior before metrics do • Why “discomfort” is the earliest sign of a real insight • How to read emotional signals consumers can’t articulate • The danger of relying on “experienced patterns” in fast-moving markets Kirsten breaks down how she built a $3B consumer fund by treating intuition as a skill to train - not a feeling to trust blindly. For anyone navigating consumer behavior, this conversation is a reminder that the earliest truths aren’t found in the data - they’re sensed in the moment.

Dara

53,799 Aufrufe • vor 8 Monaten

We're entering a new era of software where a single person, working with AI agents, can build products that previously required entire teams. In this episode of the Lightcone Podcast, they break down the rise of AI coding agents, "tokenmaxxing", and the emerging workflows behind tools like Claude Code and OpenClaw. They discuss why AI systems today feel less like productivity tools and more like collaborators, why the future of AI should be personal and user-controlled, and how founders are starting to build software in completely new ways. 00:00 — Will you control your AI? 00:47 — Coding again after 13 years 01:56 — Rebuilding a startup with Claude Code 05:50 — Software that thinks like a journalist 07:09 — The rise of “tokenmaxxing” 10:07 — The accidental creation of GStack 14:21 — The workflow behind 400x output 20:59 — Thin Harness, Fat Skills 24:35 — AI agents are like Ferraris 27:12 — The future of personal AI 38:37 — Buying back time with tokens
41:29

We're entering a new era of software where a single person, working with AI agents, can build products that previously required entire teams. In this episode of the Lightcone Podcast, they break down the rise of AI coding agents, "tokenmaxxing", and the emerging workflows behind tools like Claude Code and OpenClaw. They discuss why AI systems today feel less like productivity tools and more like collaborators, why the future of AI should be personal and user-controlled, and how founders are starting to build software in completely new ways. 00:00 — Will you control your AI? 00:47 — Coding again after 13 years 01:56 — Rebuilding a startup with Claude Code 05:50 — Software that thinks like a journalist 07:09 — The rise of “tokenmaxxing” 10:07 — The accidental creation of GStack 14:21 — The workflow behind 400x output 20:59 — Thin Harness, Fat Skills 24:35 — AI agents are like Ferraris 27:12 — The future of personal AI 38:37 — Buying back time with tokens

Y Combinator

67,145 Aufrufe • vor 3 Monaten

“Founders aren’t made when they start companies. They’re made when they interpret their market correctly.” Episode 2 of Knuckle Up with Nakul is live. Qasar Younis (Qasar Younis): Founder and CEO of Applied Intuition. One of the sharpest and most intentional operators you’ll ever meet on the craft of building a company. Full episode ↓ -- 00:00 Intro 01:19 What really makes someone a founder 05:26 The company that almost became Kickstarter 08:12 The most common misread on feedback 13:40 Why most founders don't end up with the best team 19:45 How to pick a co-founder 23:38 Your first 10 hires are really your first 100 28:21 The case for hiring slow and firing slow 33:22 Red, yellow, green: how Applied gives monthly feedback 35:00 The role that knows what’s actually going on in a company 40:01 How to operate with speed and intentionality 42:41 The three things Qasar spends time on 45:57 How Applied is driving AI adoption 52:06 The type of engineer Applied is now looking for 1:01:19 Why this could be the golden age of small companies 1:09:13 Quickfire: red flags, overrated advice, and superpowers 1:12:32 Qasar's advice to his 25-year-old self
1:13:20

“Founders aren’t made when they start companies. They’re made when they interpret their market correctly.” Episode 2 of Knuckle Up with Nakul is live. Qasar Younis (Qasar Younis): Founder and CEO of Applied Intuition. One of the sharpest and most intentional operators you’ll ever meet on the craft of building a company. Full episode ↓ -- 00:00 Intro 01:19 What really makes someone a founder 05:26 The company that almost became Kickstarter 08:12 The most common misread on feedback 13:40 Why most founders don't end up with the best team 19:45 How to pick a co-founder 23:38 Your first 10 hires are really your first 100 28:21 The case for hiring slow and firing slow 33:22 Red, yellow, green: how Applied gives monthly feedback 35:00 The role that knows what’s actually going on in a company 40:01 How to operate with speed and intentionality 42:41 The three things Qasar spends time on 45:57 How Applied is driving AI adoption 52:06 The type of engineer Applied is now looking for 1:01:19 Why this could be the golden age of small companies 1:09:13 Quickfire: red flags, overrated advice, and superpowers 1:12:32 Qasar's advice to his 25-year-old self

Nakul Mandan

521,630 Aufrufe • vor 3 Monaten

hey all -- posting my full a16z speedrun 🧊 chat with Jason Citron (Jason Citron), Co-Founder of Discord. He has had an incredible run over there. We cover Discord’s beginnings as a game studio, beating incumbents like TeamSpeak and Skype, and re-discovering its roots in gaming in recent years. 0:00 - The Pain of Pivoting 00:53 - How Discord Started 02:01 - Building a Chat App for Gamers 03:57 - Early Doubts and Employee Quitting 06:29 - Letting Go of One-Third of the Company 08:19 - Why People Stay at Discord 09:31 - Discord’s #1 Company Value 10:50 - Why Skype & TeamSpeak Failed Gamers 11:38 - Discord Leaked IP Story 14:03 - Discord’s Early Investor Reactions 16:23 - Lessons from the First Startup 17:25 - Pivots That Changed the Mindset 19:10 - Defining Company Values Early 19:56 - Discord’s Business Model 22:18 - Balancing Gamers vs. New Audiences 24:28 - Discord’s COVID Pivot 28:11 - Returning Focus to Gamers 29:35 - Opening Up the Platform to Developers 30:51 - Does AI Fit into Discord’s Future?
37:39

hey all -- posting my full a16z speedrun 🧊 chat with Jason Citron (Jason Citron), Co-Founder of Discord. He has had an incredible run over there. We cover Discord’s beginnings as a game studio, beating incumbents like TeamSpeak and Skype, and re-discovering its roots in gaming in recent years. 0:00 - The Pain of Pivoting 00:53 - How Discord Started 02:01 - Building a Chat App for Gamers 03:57 - Early Doubts and Employee Quitting 06:29 - Letting Go of One-Third of the Company 08:19 - Why People Stay at Discord 09:31 - Discord’s #1 Company Value 10:50 - Why Skype & TeamSpeak Failed Gamers 11:38 - Discord Leaked IP Story 14:03 - Discord’s Early Investor Reactions 16:23 - Lessons from the First Startup 17:25 - Pivots That Changed the Mindset 19:10 - Defining Company Values Early 19:56 - Discord’s Business Model 22:18 - Balancing Gamers vs. New Audiences 24:28 - Discord’s COVID Pivot 28:11 - Returning Focus to Gamers 29:35 - Opening Up the Platform to Developers 30:51 - Does AI Fit into Discord’s Future?

andrew chen

20,005 Aufrufe • vor 1 Jahr

"We'll get to a point in intelligence where the human making that decision is going to be less efficient than the AI making that decision themselves." My full conversation with the head of AI at the Solana Foundation on the world coming fast, where AI starts earning, investing and outpacing the humans who built it. 00:00 Intro 02:46 The Wall Street dream he ditched 06:50 The cold email that changed everything 08:07 Meeting the founder of Stable Diffusion 11:36 Why Rishin left investing to build AI 20:31 When AI starts paying for things itself 23:36 The moment that predicted the future 31:35 Three people, five weeks, one product 38:01 When AI stops asking you first 41:09 When your customer is a robot 44:01 How much of the economy will AI run
48:32

"We'll get to a point in intelligence where the human making that decision is going to be less efficient than the AI making that decision themselves." My full conversation with the head of AI at the Solana Foundation on the world coming fast, where AI starts earning, investing and outpacing the humans who built it. 00:00 Intro 02:46 The Wall Street dream he ditched 06:50 The cold email that changed everything 08:07 Meeting the founder of Stable Diffusion 11:36 Why Rishin left investing to build AI 20:31 When AI starts paying for things itself 23:36 The moment that predicted the future 31:35 Three people, five weeks, one product 38:01 When AI stops asking you first 41:09 When your customer is a robot 44:01 How much of the economy will AI run

JackGK

19,233 Aufrufe • vor 1 Monat

My first interview with Eric Jorgenson 📚 ☀️, Author of The Book of Elon. 0:12 Why Elon outcompetes everyone 1:53 Not wanting to be CEO 6:15 Why there was a 1 in 100 chance of Tesla and SpaceX both succeeding 10:03 Thinking in lost future revenue 11:58 Living with a gun next to his bed 15:02 How Elon starts companies 19:23 Giving Larry Page an early demo of the Roadster 21:27 Why Elon calls people into the factory at 2am 25:01 The 20 people who execute Elon’s will autonomously - MrBeast clones 28:52 Working with Elon is doing a tour of duty 31:18 Creating a grand vision that people can believe in 36:42 How to thrive under Elon 37:30 The Algorithm - question every requirement, delete part or process, simplify and optimize, accelerate, automate 41:38 Setting up a tent factory in the Tesla Fremont parking lot 43:28 How Elon would play the game if he was born 300 years ago 45:10 Empathy for the individual vs empathy for the mission 46:57 Being feared vs being loved 48:38 The endless churn at Elon companies 50:49 Ruthlessness and having a willingness to be disliked 56:08 Creating enemies and chaos 58:37 Shifting SpaceX’s focus from Mars to building a base on the Moon 1:00:07 Justifying Tesla’s valuation by reseting the vision 1:02:21 The S-Curve of ambition - colonizing planets, Starlink, Terafab 1:04:44 Throwing billions of dollars behind new companies 1:06:22 A great team is just the sum of the individual vectors 1:11:09 The idiot index at an industry-scale 1:13:53 Why it’s critical for space companies to control launch 1:15:44 Thinking in limits 1:18:47 Expanding the vision until no one can measure it 1:23:41 Internalizing pain and dealing with setbacks 1:26:03 The evolution of Elon’s operating philosophy over the last 30 years 1:27:37 Effectiveness
1:29:15

My first interview with Eric Jorgenson 📚 ☀️, Author of The Book of Elon. 0:12 Why Elon outcompetes everyone 1:53 Not wanting to be CEO 6:15 Why there was a 1 in 100 chance of Tesla and SpaceX both succeeding 10:03 Thinking in lost future revenue 11:58 Living with a gun next to his bed 15:02 How Elon starts companies 19:23 Giving Larry Page an early demo of the Roadster 21:27 Why Elon calls people into the factory at 2am 25:01 The 20 people who execute Elon’s will autonomously - MrBeast clones 28:52 Working with Elon is doing a tour of duty 31:18 Creating a grand vision that people can believe in 36:42 How to thrive under Elon 37:30 The Algorithm - question every requirement, delete part or process, simplify and optimize, accelerate, automate 41:38 Setting up a tent factory in the Tesla Fremont parking lot 43:28 How Elon would play the game if he was born 300 years ago 45:10 Empathy for the individual vs empathy for the mission 46:57 Being feared vs being loved 48:38 The endless churn at Elon companies 50:49 Ruthlessness and having a willingness to be disliked 56:08 Creating enemies and chaos 58:37 Shifting SpaceX’s focus from Mars to building a base on the Moon 1:00:07 Justifying Tesla’s valuation by reseting the vision 1:02:21 The S-Curve of ambition - colonizing planets, Starlink, Terafab 1:04:44 Throwing billions of dollars behind new companies 1:06:22 A great team is just the sum of the individual vectors 1:11:09 The idiot index at an industry-scale 1:13:53 Why it’s critical for space companies to control launch 1:15:44 Thinking in limits 1:18:47 Expanding the vision until no one can measure it 1:23:41 Internalizing pain and dealing with setbacks 1:26:03 The evolution of Elon’s operating philosophy over the last 30 years 1:27:37 Effectiveness

Ti Morse

126,252 Aufrufe • vor 4 Monaten

I sat down with Nicolas Sharp, founder of Attio, to talk in depth about how his company is disrupting the $80 billion CRM market. Attio has raised $116m, is 4x'ing ARR and is one of the fastest growing companies in Europe. We talk about: - Why Attio went against all conventional wisdom and spent years 3 years building the product before launching - Why Attio doesn’t hire ‘Software Engineers’ and who they hire instead. - How Attio chose investors who would back a long-term bet against multi-billion $ incumbents - How Attio is building CRM from first principles for the AI era - Who should you avoid hiring at all costs, and who should you hire for your startup And so much more. If you’re interested in learning about the story of how Nick built Attio into the incredible company it is today and is disrupting one of the most important software categories, you’re going to want to see this. Enjoy // Timestamps 00:00 Intro 00:39 Why Attio spent 3 years building their product before launch 5:05 The Power of Building Systems, Not a Box of Features 9:05 How to know when it’s time to launch 13:30 Nick’s Playbook For a Killer Product Launch 18:09 How To Go From an Investor to a Founder 23:05 How Failure Led to Attio's Big Break 28:07 Why startups need to hire "Hidden Gems," 34:05 Fundraising 49:36 Why Attio Invests In Inexperienced Talent 55:07 The Case For Not Hiring Software Engineers (& Who You Should Hire Instead) 1:02:46 The 8 Persona Hiring Framework 1:09:05 How Attio doesn’t use OKR's 1:27:11 Where does Nick's Ambition and Grit come from? 1:36:59 How Attio is Building CRM from First Principles for the AI era 1:45:29 How to Successfully Market In A Crowded Industry 1:51:10 Breaking Down Attio’s Viral Marketing Strategies 2:02:15 The Change That Had The Biggest Impact on Customer Conversion 2:05:04 Why Attio created A “Reverse Trial” 2:10:16 Why Nick is building from London, not Silicon Valley 2:22:48 The 10-Year Vision for Attio
2:26:34

I sat down with Nicolas Sharp, founder of Attio, to talk in depth about how his company is disrupting the $80 billion CRM market. Attio has raised $116m, is 4x'ing ARR and is one of the fastest growing companies in Europe. We talk about: - Why Attio went against all conventional wisdom and spent years 3 years building the product before launching - Why Attio doesn’t hire ‘Software Engineers’ and who they hire instead. - How Attio chose investors who would back a long-term bet against multi-billion $ incumbents - How Attio is building CRM from first principles for the AI era - Who should you avoid hiring at all costs, and who should you hire for your startup And so much more. If you’re interested in learning about the story of how Nick built Attio into the incredible company it is today and is disrupting one of the most important software categories, you’re going to want to see this. Enjoy // Timestamps 00:00 Intro 00:39 Why Attio spent 3 years building their product before launch 5:05 The Power of Building Systems, Not a Box of Features 9:05 How to know when it’s time to launch 13:30 Nick’s Playbook For a Killer Product Launch 18:09 How To Go From an Investor to a Founder 23:05 How Failure Led to Attio's Big Break 28:07 Why startups need to hire "Hidden Gems," 34:05 Fundraising 49:36 Why Attio Invests In Inexperienced Talent 55:07 The Case For Not Hiring Software Engineers (& Who You Should Hire Instead) 1:02:46 The 8 Persona Hiring Framework 1:09:05 How Attio doesn’t use OKR's 1:27:11 Where does Nick's Ambition and Grit come from? 1:36:59 How Attio is Building CRM from First Principles for the AI era 1:45:29 How to Successfully Market In A Crowded Industry 1:51:10 Breaking Down Attio’s Viral Marketing Strategies 2:02:15 The Change That Had The Biggest Impact on Customer Conversion 2:05:04 Why Attio created A “Reverse Trial” 2:10:16 Why Nick is building from London, not Silicon Valley 2:22:48 The 10-Year Vision for Attio

Wouter Teunissen

26,369 Aufrufe • vor 10 Monaten

Launching a new podcast today! Filmed at our NYC office, each episode of The Archive focuses on a founder or operator who has built an important crypto business/protocol. The first episode is with Keone Hon, founder of Monad. We dive into Keone’s upbringing, the early days of Monad and the journey to raising the seed round. Plus, we talk about recruiting + scaling the team, and the philosophies they used to launch and grow the network. Here's what we discussed: 0:00 - Intro 0:42 - Altitude 1:32 - Monad's Launch 4:25 - Keone’s early life and interests 16:52 - Where Keone’s work ethic came from 19:52 - Working at Jump and how the culture passed on to Monad 24:26 - Starting Monad 30:05 - Raising the seed round for Monad 32:29 - Growing the Monad community and open-sourcing code 36:35 - How Keone hired for the early team 44:07 - The future of Category Labs 51:26 - Which metrics is Monad focusing on 1:00:24 - Building a base of loyal and passionate users 1:07:45 - The personality of an L1 founder 1:13:46 - Founders that Keone looks up to 1:18:34 - Day in the life of Keone 1:23:57 - The endgame vision for Monad
1:26:31

Launching a new podcast today! Filmed at our NYC office, each episode of The Archive focuses on a founder or operator who has built an important crypto business/protocol. The first episode is with Keone Hon, founder of Monad. We dive into Keone’s upbringing, the early days of Monad and the journey to raising the seed round. Plus, we talk about recruiting + scaling the team, and the philosophies they used to launch and grow the network. Here's what we discussed: 0:00 - Intro 0:42 - Altitude 1:32 - Monad's Launch 4:25 - Keone’s early life and interests 16:52 - Where Keone’s work ethic came from 19:52 - Working at Jump and how the culture passed on to Monad 24:26 - Starting Monad 30:05 - Raising the seed round for Monad 32:29 - Growing the Monad community and open-sourcing code 36:35 - How Keone hired for the early team 44:07 - The future of Category Labs 51:26 - Which metrics is Monad focusing on 1:00:24 - Building a base of loyal and passionate users 1:07:45 - The personality of an L1 founder 1:13:46 - Founders that Keone looks up to 1:18:34 - Day in the life of Keone 1:23:57 - The endgame vision for Monad

Derek Hsue

69,907 Aufrufe • vor 6 Monaten

"A week is 2% of the year. The cadence we operate on is: A week is not the shortest timeline. It's the longest timeline. What can we decide by tomorrow?" - Michael Grinich. Michael Grinich. Founder and CEO of WorkOS. The company powering the enterprise adoption of AI. Knuckle Up ↓ -- 00:00 Introduction 01:33 From design-obsessed founder to enterprise infrastructure 04:20 Michael’s year off and what made the WorkOS bet obvious 06:54 Why a great startup idea has to look bad first 09:46 Minimum awesome product beats MVP 11:09 The org with no CRO, no VP of sales, and one PM 13:29 Hiring for curiosity, not credentials 16:25 The "AI pilled" interview red flag 18:25 A week is 2% of the year 26:00 How WorkOS approaches brand 33:00 The future shape of engineering orgs 43:20 Why senior engineers benefit most from AI 44:45 Micro-leadership over micromanagement 49:10 Tough times in the early days 59:04 The reverse Peter principle 1:04:38 Quickfire: red flags, hires too early, and biggest fears 1:10:30 Michael's advice to his 25-year-old self
1:12:20

"A week is 2% of the year. The cadence we operate on is: A week is not the shortest timeline. It's the longest timeline. What can we decide by tomorrow?" - Michael Grinich. Michael Grinich. Founder and CEO of WorkOS. The company powering the enterprise adoption of AI. Knuckle Up ↓ -- 00:00 Introduction 01:33 From design-obsessed founder to enterprise infrastructure 04:20 Michael’s year off and what made the WorkOS bet obvious 06:54 Why a great startup idea has to look bad first 09:46 Minimum awesome product beats MVP 11:09 The org with no CRO, no VP of sales, and one PM 13:29 Hiring for curiosity, not credentials 16:25 The "AI pilled" interview red flag 18:25 A week is 2% of the year 26:00 How WorkOS approaches brand 33:00 The future shape of engineering orgs 43:20 Why senior engineers benefit most from AI 44:45 Micro-leadership over micromanagement 49:10 Tough times in the early days 59:04 The reverse Peter principle 1:04:38 Quickfire: red flags, hires too early, and biggest fears 1:10:30 Michael's advice to his 25-year-old self

Nakul Mandan

671,989 Aufrufe • vor 3 Monaten

Brex co-founder and CEO Pedro Franceschi believes most people still underestimate how much AI will change the way companies are built. AI isn't just another tool, it's a new foundation for building products, teams, and companies. In this episode of Lightcone Podcast, Pedro Franceschi explains why we're only months into a platform shift as significant as the invention of electricity, why the CEO needs to be the chief AI officer, and why founders should rethink what's possible when intelligence is available on demand. 01:13 – How Pedro Became AI-Pilled 04:08 – The Electricity Analogy 05:21 – Free the Claw 06:56 – Making AI Safe for Enterprise 10:57 – Why Most Companies Are Behind 13:09 – AI Teammates, Not Chatbots 14:22 – The Case for Tokenmaxxing 18:24 – The Company of One 20:54 – The One Thing AI Can't Replace 28:06 – Building Customer World Models 32:58 – Rebuilding Brex Around AI 39:02 – The CEO Must Be the Chief AI Officer 43:50 – Building Company AGI 51:43 – Why We're Still So Early
54:06

Brex co-founder and CEO Pedro Franceschi believes most people still underestimate how much AI will change the way companies are built. AI isn't just another tool, it's a new foundation for building products, teams, and companies. In this episode of Lightcone Podcast, Pedro Franceschi explains why we're only months into a platform shift as significant as the invention of electricity, why the CEO needs to be the chief AI officer, and why founders should rethink what's possible when intelligence is available on demand. 01:13 – How Pedro Became AI-Pilled 04:08 – The Electricity Analogy 05:21 – Free the Claw 06:56 – Making AI Safe for Enterprise 10:57 – Why Most Companies Are Behind 13:09 – AI Teammates, Not Chatbots 14:22 – The Case for Tokenmaxxing 18:24 – The Company of One 20:54 – The One Thing AI Can't Replace 28:06 – Building Customer World Models 32:58 – Rebuilding Brex Around AI 39:02 – The CEO Must Be the Chief AI Officer 43:50 – Building Company AGI 51:43 – Why We're Still So Early

Y Combinator

198,105 Aufrufe • vor 2 Monaten

What happens when AI agents make mistakes? On this week’s episode of The Investment Memo, Lightspeed Partner James Alcorn sits down with Judgment Labs co-founder Alex Shan to discuss the agent workflow (and more). Alex started researching AI performance at Stanford when he was just 16. Today, alongside co-founders Andrew Li and Joseph Camyre, the team is building the quality layer for the agent era. The episode goes deep into many critical questions, like why agent evaluation is becoming critical infrastructure, how to measure trust and reliability, and what breaks when agents move from demos to production. We’re excited to have led the Seed and co-led the Series A, totaling $32M in funding. Tune into the full conversation about the future of AI evaluation, in the era where judgment is everything. Chapters 0:00 Putting Agent Improvement On Autopilot 2:20 What Judgment Labs Actually Does 3:09 Being A Full Lifecycle Agent Behavior Monitoring Platform 4:59 How The Co-Founders Met 7:57 The Fundraising Journey With Lightspeed 11:57 Two Core Technological Bets That Shaped The Product 14:49 The Philosophy Behind Partnering With Customers 17:28 How They Choose Their Early Customers 19:40 The 5-Year Vision For Judgment Labs 22:10 Where The Business Goes From Here 24:39 How To Get In Touch With Alex And The Team
25:41

What happens when AI agents make mistakes? On this week’s episode of The Investment Memo, Lightspeed Partner James Alcorn sits down with Judgment Labs co-founder Alex Shan to discuss the agent workflow (and more). Alex started researching AI performance at Stanford when he was just 16. Today, alongside co-founders Andrew Li and Joseph Camyre, the team is building the quality layer for the agent era. The episode goes deep into many critical questions, like why agent evaluation is becoming critical infrastructure, how to measure trust and reliability, and what breaks when agents move from demos to production. We’re excited to have led the Seed and co-led the Series A, totaling $32M in funding. Tune into the full conversation about the future of AI evaluation, in the era where judgment is everything. Chapters 0:00 Putting Agent Improvement On Autopilot 2:20 What Judgment Labs Actually Does 3:09 Being A Full Lifecycle Agent Behavior Monitoring Platform 4:59 How The Co-Founders Met 7:57 The Fundraising Journey With Lightspeed 11:57 Two Core Technological Bets That Shaped The Product 14:49 The Philosophy Behind Partnering With Customers 17:28 How They Choose Their Early Customers 19:40 The 5-Year Vision For Judgment Labs 22:10 Where The Business Goes From Here 24:39 How To Get In Touch With Alex And The Team

Lightspeed

18,045 Aufrufe • vor 1 Monat